


Reflections

by Fira21



Category: Harry Potter - J. K. Rowling
Genre: Gen, Minor Character Death
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2012-10-09
Updated: 2012-10-09
Packaged: 2018-01-17 22:55:47
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 809
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/1405633
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Fira21/pseuds/Fira21
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>He thinks it must be different for other people. When their parents get old, they get old. Their joints don’t move the same, muscles are weaker, there are lines of laughter and sorrow.</p><p>He doesn’t have that. His parents has existed in the same state of far-too-old for so long he had forgotten. He had forgotten the time that had passed and had forgotten they were getting older.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Reflections

He thinks it must be different for other people. When their parents get old, they _get old_. Their joints don’t move the same, muscles are weaker, there are lines of laughter and sorrow.

He doesn’t have that. His parents has existed in the same state of far-too-old for so long he had forgotten. He had forgotten the time that had passed and had forgotten they were getting older.

It had been normal with his Gran. He knew she was old, could see it in every twitch of her face, the strain she tried to hide behind bravado. Ever determined she was. But even with all her inner strength he knew when she was reaching her time. He could see the difference in her face. Skin sagging, free and limp, no longer beaten into smooth submission, allowed to droop in a way that if his Gran could have seen, she would have been appalled.

He hadn’t expected to lose her before his parents. Had always thought she’d be there with him, to hold his hand. No words, no tears, but a strong grip in consolation. He had nothing though. No one to share his grief. He hadn’t expected to feel it as much as he did. They had been gone for an age. They existed, but they hadn’t lived.

It’s what made this so hard. When he looks at his mother’s face, his father’s face who had passed mere moments after her, there’s no change. There’s no shift. Nothing to denote a passing, a sign of relief and repose. Their muscles had given up a long time ago.

And they still looked the same.

He had forgotten they were human. He had expected them to keep on in their state of never-quite-there.

He had forgotten they were human. Never seeing recognition in their face, even after so many years, just the look of a lost child in the face of a melting, shrivelled husk.

He had forgotten they were human. Hadn’t prepared, hadn’t readied himself to mourn, hadn’t readied himself for a time when his holidays and spare bits of time weren’t filled with hospital visits, not out of love because he wasn’t sure how to love someone that wasn’t there.

He had forgotten they were human. Had seen them as an obligation, you were meant to care for your parents and want to see them, meant to feel for them, meant to love them.

He had forgotten they were human. Had seen them as these strange creatures in a state of limbo, couldn’t think of them really as mum and dad the older he got and realized what real parents were like, nothing but pictures and half-cobbled stories as a replacement for honest true memories.

He had forgotten they were human. True human beings that had once had lives, and loves, and memories, and deserved his respect and yes, even his love. These people he had stopped seeing as people, instead as soulless things trying to suck every ounce of free time and happiness from his life, bogging him down with responsibility when parents were supposed to free you from the responsibilities for once.

He had forgotten they were human. So yes, when they died, he had been surprised, and in the end had experienced a swell of honest, true emotion he couldn’t remember ever feeling for these beings before, for his _parents_. He had been surprised that they had actually died, weren’t around to monopolize his time anymore and that thought alone hit him. He had stopped thinking of them as his parents, maybe he never truly had. He was no better than the papers, penning the stories and with a sense of detachment pretending he truly felt sorrow, that he truly _felt at all_. These two beings, these creatures, were his parents, not things, but people and he had never truly accepted that.

He had forgotten they were human and in turn, had forgotten how to be human himself along the way. So it came to be that when he got home he pulled out old boxes, old photos and memories and hidden, dusty tattered _lives_ , lives he had pretended never existed and he looked through what had been. He thought of what had been taken and the life he could have had. Thought of his clinging creatures as people, the people they could have been, and slowly he took every last memory of his little beings and replaced them. Replaced the sagging with taut shining skin, yellowed teeth with white, dulled yet crazed eyes with bright shining _life_. Took his beings and replaced them and made them new and made them his and made them his _parents_ , alive and bright and well. An honour to their memory and life. He replaced this creatures with human beings, with family.  
  
He remembered they were human. And he cried.


End file.
